A Distant Mirror (95 page)

The fatal masquerade came to be called the
Bal des Ardents—
Dance of the Burning Ones—but it could as well have been called the
Danse Macabre
, after a new kind of processional play on the theme of death that had lately come into vogue. Of uncertain origin and meaning, the name Macabre first appeared in writing in a poem of 1376 by Anjou’s chancellor, Jean le Fèvre, containing the line,
“Je fis de Macabré le danse
(I do the Danse Macabre). It may have derived from an older
Danse Machabreus
, meaning “of the Maccabees,” or from similarity to the Hebrew word for grave-diggers and the fact that Jews worked as grave-diggers in medieval France. The dance itself probably developed under the influence of recurring plague, as a street performance to illustrate sermons on the submission of all alike to Death the Leveler. In murals illustrating the dance at the Church of the Innocents in Paris, fifteen pairs of figures, clerical and lay, from pope and emperor down the scale to monk and peasant, friar and child, make up the procession.

“Advance, see yourselves in us,” they say in the accompanying
verses, “dead, naked, rotten and stinking. So will you be.… To live without thinking of this risks damnation.… Power, honor, riches are naught; at the hour of death only good works count.… Everyone should think at least once a day of his loathsome end,” to remind him to do good deeds and go to mass if he wishes to be redeemed and escape “the dreadful pain of hell without end which is unspeakable.”

Each figure speaks his piece: the constable knows that Death carries off the bravest, even Charlemagne; the knight, once loved by the ladies, knows that he will make them dance no more; the plump abbot, that “the fattest rots first”; the astrologer, that his knowledge cannot save him; the peasant who has lived all his days in care and toil and often wished for death, now when the hour has come would much rather be digging in the vineyards “even in rain and wind.” The point is made over and over, that here is you and you and you. The cadaverous figure who leads the procession is not Death but the Dead One. “It is yourself,” says the inscription under the murals of the dance at La Chaise-Dieu in Auvergne.

The cult of death was to reach its height in the 15th century, but its source was in the 14th. When death was to be met any day around any corner, it might have been expected to become banal; instead it exerted a ghoulish fascination. Emphasis was on worms and putrefaction and gruesome physical details. Where formerly the dominant idea of death was the spiritual journey of the soul, now the rotting of the body seemed more significant. Effigies of earlier centuries were serene, with hands joined in prayer and eyes open, anticipating eternal life. Now, following Harsigny’s example, great prelates often had themselves shown as cadavers in realistic detail. To accomplish this, death masks and molds of bodily parts were made of wax, incidentally promoting portraiture and a new recognition of individual traits. The message of the effigies was that of the Danse Macabre. Over the scrawny, undraped corpse of Cardinal Jean de La Grange, who was to die in Avignon in 1402, the inscription asks observers, “So, miserable one, what cause for pride?”

The cult of the lugubrious in coming decades made the
cemetery of the Innocents at Paris, with the Danse Macabre painted on its walls, the most desirable burial place and popular meeting place in Paris. Charnel houses built into the 48 arches of the cloister were donated by rich bourgeois and nobles—among them Boucicaut and Berry—to hold their remains. Because twenty parishes had the right of burial at the Innocents, the old dead had to be continually disinterred and their tombstones sold to make room for the new. Skulls and bones piled up under the cloister arches were an attraction for the curious, and bleak
proof of ultimate leveling. Shops of all kinds found room in and around the cloister; prostitutes solicited there, alchemists found a market place, gallants made it a rendezvous, dogs wandered in and out. Parisians came to tour the charnel houses, watch burials and disinterments, gaze at the murals, and read the verses. They listened to daylong sermons and shuddered as the Dead One blowing his horn entered from the Rue St. Denis leading his procession of awful dancers.

Art followed the lugubrious. The crown of thorns, rarely pictured before, became a realistic instrument of pain drawing blood in the paintings of the second half of the century. The Virgin acquired seven sorrows, ranging from the flight into Egypt to the Pietà—the limp dead body of her son lying across her knees. Claus Sluter, sculptor to the Duke of Burgundy, made the first known Pietà in France in 1390 for the convent of Champmol at Dijon. At the same time, the playful smiling faces of the so-called Beautiful Madonnas with their gentle draperies and happy infants appear amid the gloom. Secular painting is gay and exquisite; Death never disturbs those lyrical picnics beneath enchanted towers.

The Black Death returned for the fourth time in 1388–90. Earlier recurrences had affected chiefly children who had not acquired immunity, but in the fourth round a new adult generation fell under the swift contagion. By this time Europe’s population was reduced to between 40 and 50 percent of what it had been when the century opened, and it was to fall even lower by mid-15th century. People of the time rarely mention this startling diminution of their world, although it was certainly visible to them in reduced trade, in narrowed areas of cultivation, in abbeys and churches abandoned or unable to maintain services for lack of revenue, in urban districts destroyed in war and left unrepaired after sixty years.

On the other hand, it may be that when people were fewer they ate better, and proportionately more money circulated. Contradictory conditions are always present. Evidence of growing business exists alongside that of lowered trade. An Italian merchant who died in 1410 left 100,000 documents of correspondence with agents in Italy, France, Spain, England, and Tunisia. The merchant class had more money at its command than before, and its expenditures encouraged arts, comforts, and technological advance. The 14th century was not arid. The tapestry workshops of Arras, Brussels, and the famous Nicolas Bataille of Paris produced wonders which robbed stained glass of its primacy in decorative art. Mariners’ maps reached new efficiency, allowing sea monsters to disappear from the lower corner in favor of accurate coastlines and navigational aids. Bourgeois money created a new audience
for writers and poets and encouraged literature through the buying of books. Several thousand scribes were employed turning out copies to meet the demand of the 25 booksellers and
stationarii
of Paris. The flamboyant in architecture, with its lavish multitude of attenuated pinnacles, canopied niches, and lacy buttresses, expressed not only a technical exuberance but a denial, even a defiance, of decline. How to reconcile with pessimism the Milan Cathedral, that fantastic mountain of filigree in stone begun in the last quarter of the century?

Psychological effects are clearer than the physical. Never was so much written about the
miseria
of human life, and the sense of dwindling numbers, even if unmentioned, promoted pessimism about human fate. “What schal befalle hiereafter, God wot,” wrote John Gower in England in 1393,

For men of affairs no less than poets, the insecurity of the time allowed little confidence in the future. The letters of Francesco Datini, merchant of Prato, show him living in daily dread of war, pestilence, famine, and insurrection, believing neither in the stability of government nor in the honesty of colleagues. “The earth and the sea are full of robbers,” he wrote to one of his partners, “and the great part of mankind is evilly disposed.”

Gerson believed he lived in the senility of the world when society, like some delirious old man, suffered from fantasies and illusions. He, like others, felt the time was at hand for the coming of Anti-Christ and the end of the world—to be followed by a better one. In popular expectation, Apocalypse would bring the return of a great emperor—a second Charlemagne, a third Frederick, an imperial messiah—who, coupled with an angelic pope, would reform the Church, renew society, and save Christendom. Churchmen and moralists in apocalyptic mood stressed more than ever the vanity of worldly things—though without visibly diminishing anyone’s desire for, and pride in, possessions.

A pessimistic view of man’s fate was the duty of the clergy in order to prove the need of salvation. It was by no means new to the 14th century. If Cardinal d’Ailly thought the time of Anti-Christ was at hand, so had Thomas Aquinas a hundred years before. If the corruption of the Church dismayed the devout, it had done so no less in the
year 1040 when a monk of Cluny wrote, “For whensoever religion hath failed among the pontiffs … what can we think but that the whole human race, root and branch, is sliding willingly down again into the gulf of primaeval chaos?” If in a waning period Mézières’ favorite dictum was “The things of this fleeting world go ever from bad to worse,” he was matched by Roger Bacon, who had asserted in 1271, at the height of a dynamic period, “More sins reign in these days than in any past age … justice perisheth, all peace is broken.”

The sentiments were not new, but in the 14th century they were more pervasive and more disparaging of the human kind. “Time past had virtue and righteousness, but today reigns only vice,” is Deschamps’ lament. How may safe-conducts be trusted? asks Christine de Pisan, discussing the failures of chivalry, “seeing the little truth and fidelity that this day runneth through all the world.” Elsewhere she writes, “All good customs fail and virtues are held at discount. Learning which once governed is now of no account.” Her complaint had some justification, for even the University had taken to selling degrees in theology to candidates unwilling to undertake its long and difficult studies or fearful of failing the examination. License to grant the degree was extended to other universities, even to towns which had no university, giving rise to the sarcastic saying, “Why not [a degree] from a pigsty?” Denouncing the age for decadence was in fashion, but the decadence was felt as real, and the sense of a moral decline from some better day in the past was insistent. The poets wrote for the very circles they denounced and they must have touched some responsive chord. Deschamps—who never left off scolding—was made chamberlain to Louis d’Orléans in 1382.

All ranks of life shared in the blame. Deeply shaken by the Peasants’ Revolt, Gower wrote a jeremiad on the corruptions of the age called
Vox Clamantis
, in which he unfolds a “manifold pestilence of vices” among poor as well as rich. The unknown author of another indictment entitled it “
Vices of the Different Orders of Society,” and found all equally at fault: the Church is sunk in schism and simony, clergy and monks are in darkness, kings, nobles, and knights given over to indulgence and rapine, merchants to usury and fraud; law is a creature of bribery; the commons are plunged in ignorance and oppressed by robbers and murderers.

Mankind was at one of history’s ebbs. At mid-century the Black Death had raised the question of God’s hostility to man, and events since then had offered little reassurance. To contemporaries the
miseria
of the time reflected sin, and, indeed, sin in the form of greed and
inhumanity abounded. On the downward slope of the Middle Ages man had lost confidence in his capacity to construct a good society.

The yearning for peace and for an end to the schism was widely voiced. A
notary of Cahors said at this time that in all 36 years of his life he had never known his diocese without war. Thoughtful observers, conscious of social damage, called for peace as the only hope of reform, of re-uniting the Church, and of resisting the Turks, who had reached the Danube. In his
Dream of the Old Pilgrim
, written in 1389 to persuade Charles VI and Richard II to make peace, Mézières draws a pathetic and dramatic picture of an old woman in torn clothes, with disheveled gray hair, leaning on a cane and carrying a little book gnawed by rats. She was called Devotion, but is now called Despair because dwellers of her kingdom are in slavery to Mohammed, Christian trade is endangered, the eastern ramparts of Christendom menaced by enemies of the Faith.

“Veniat Pax!,”
the cry of Gerson’s famous sermon of fifteen years later, was already sounding in people’s minds. Few could tell what the war was fought for. In England, Gower thought it no longer a just war but one prolonged by “greedy lords” for gain. Let it be over, he cried, “so that the world may stand appeased.” French peasants may be heard, if Deschamps is a good reporter, discussing the war as they reap. “It has gone on long enough,” says Robin, “I know no one who does not fear it. Surely the whole thing is not worth a scallion.”

“Nevertheless,” replies hunchback Henry, sadly wise,

That is the refrain of each stanza and that was the sticking point. Anxious as they might be for an end to the state of war, the rulers of France were not prepared to conclude a permanent peace that left the open gate of Calais in English hands.

For the Duke of Burgundy, peace was a pressing necessity in order to restore the commerce between Flanders and England. It could only have been with his approval that a holy man called Robert the Hermit appeared at court, sponsored by the King’s chamberlain, Guillaume Martel, to bring word that peace was Heaven’s command. When returning from Palestine, the Hermit said, a voice had spoken to him out of a terrible storm at sea, telling him that he would survive the peril
and that on reaching land he must go to the King and tell him to make peace with England, and warn that all who opposed it would pay dearly. Peace had its opponents as well as advocates.

The most important advocate—and most significant change in the situation—was the King of England. As autocratic as his father, but no soldier, Richard II wanted to end the war in order to reduce the power of the barons and promote a more absolute monarchy. His wish coincided with that of the Duke of Lancaster, who, having established his daughters as Queens of Castile and Portugal, wanted peace with France to protect their interests. “Let my brother Gloucester go make war on Sultan Bajazet, who is menacing Christendom on the frontiers of Hungary,” he said; that was the proper sphere for those anxious to fight.